Measuring: You really do get what you measure

Mar 17, 2010 | Hot Topics

This is the last in a series of articles exploring business metrics and their usefulness in the engineering software space. The last few articles in this series have covered metrics that I believe are important in running a business but, of course, in order to analyze...

ESI Group sales up 7% for 2009

Mar 16, 2010 | Hot Topics

ESI Group reported results yesterday for the year ended January 31 — and investors like. A lot. ESI’s share price is up over 7% at mid-day trading in Paris. The details: • Total revenue for the year was €75.1 million, up 7.1% as reported or nearly 4% in constant...
The real impact of the 2009 debacle

The real impact of the 2009 debacle

Mar 15, 2010 | Hot Topics

I’m updating market models for 2010 and beyond and got to wondering: How long will it take the PLM vendor group to return to 2007, pre-recession, revenue levels? (Comparisons with 2008 are easier but won’t work, since many of the vendors started feeling the slowdown...

Webinars 103: Is anybody listening?

Mar 10, 2010 | Hot Topics

I’ve been blogging a lot about webinars and for good reason: they are an effective way to get the message out to an interested audience at a very user-friendly cost. But what happens if no one shows up? As so often happens, the conversation started about something...

MSC 2010: The company revamps

Mar 9, 2010 | Hot Topics

MSC Software has quietly been remaking itself: New owner, new leadership, new public face on its website and in webinars. Over the last few weeks, the wrappers have started to come off, as the company has quietly been releasing the 2010 versions of it major products...

Smaller vendors matter too

Mar 4, 2010 | Hot Topics

We get so caught up in the earnings releases of the major PLM vendors that we forget that other companies in the PLM universe also release information, much of it more closely tied to specific geographies or subsegments. Their results help round out the picture of the...

Solvers and sunscreen

Mar 2, 2010 | Hot Topics

This is the third in a series of articles exploring business metrics and their usefulness in the engineering software space. The last post discussed the fact that the cost for keeping a specific customer may be higher than expected and may even exceed the revenue...

ANSYS Q4 beats but more cautious about 2010

Feb 25, 2010 | Hot Topics

ANSYS reported mixed results today: on the one hand, the company reported Q4 revenue of $150.4 million, handily beating the projected $136 million to $142 million and sweeping it to a 2009 revenue total of $517 million, up 8%. It should be noted that this includes...

Is it all good news?

Feb 24, 2010 | Hot Topics

A couple of people have emailed about yesterday’s posts on Autodesk’s Q4 results, asking if there were any negative aspects to the earnings data released. That’s a fair question since I focused on the bright spots in what really was a dismal year for the engineering...

Autodesk “focusing on things we can control”

Feb 23, 2010 | Hot Topics

Autodesk offered more information during its Q4 earnings call, the most startling of which was that it closed 22 deals over $1 million in Q4 — a staggering 3x the total of the first 9 months added together. A number of these were in AEC and in North America and...